1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording and/or reproducing apparatus to write and/or read an information signal to and/or from a large-capacity floppy disc.
2. Related Art
As a removable disc-like recording medium, a floppy disc has been proposed having a capacity significantly larger than existing floppy discs, for example, several tens megabytes to several hundreds megabytes. The large-capacity floppy discs have been developed as an integration of various technologies concerning materials of the recording medium, structure of the head chip, processing of read signal, existence of tracking servo, etc. Also, as a disc drive for such a large-capacity floppy disc (referred to herein as xe2x80x9clarge-capacity floppy disc drivexe2x80x9d), a head-flying type recording and/or reproducing apparatus has been proposed in which with the floppy disc being rotated at a high speed, data is written to or read from the floppy disc by a magnetic head flying from the signal recording surface of the floppy disc.
As briefly described above, the head-levitated type large-capacity floppy disc drive is adapted such that a floppy disc is rotated at a high speed to create an air flow pressure, namely, an air film, which is used to levitate the magnetic head. Magnetic head levitation has already been achieved in the field of hard disc drives. In a hard disc drive, the magnetic disc is housed in a disc cartridge and a sliding plate is levitated in which a head chip is incorporated.
In the head-flying type large-capacity floppy disc drive, a lifting mechanism is used to move the magnetic head up and down between disc cartridge unloading and loading positions.
In the large-capacity floppy disc drive, however, since the magnetic head lifting mechanism is driven at a constant speed by a DC motor, the magnetic head causes a large impact to be applied to the floppy disc which is unavoidable for mechanical reasons and consequently causes damage to the disc surface, when touching the surface of the floppy disc.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a recording and/or reproducing apparatus which avoids the aforementioned deficiencies of the prior art.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a head-levitated type large-capacity floppy disc drive for a recording and/or reproducing apparatus wherein the magnetic head does not cause a large impact to be applied to the floppy disc.
Accordingly, the present invention has an object to overcome the above-mentioned drawbacks of the prior art by providing a recording and/or reproducing apparatus in which the head chip on the sliding plate can gently touch the recording medium so as to be prevent the floppy disc from being damaged.
Various other objects, advantages and features of the present invention will become readily apparent from the ensuing detailed description and the novel features will be particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
The above objects can be attained by providing a recording and/or reproducing apparatus adapted to write an information signal to and/or read an information signal from a disc-like recording medium by a magnetic head being levitated (xe2x80x9cflyingxe2x80x9d) by an air flow created by the rotating disc-like recording medium, the apparatus includes a magnetic head to write and/or read the information signal to and/or from the disc-like recording medium; means for supporting the magnetic head; means for linearly moving the magnetic head radially of the disc-like recording medium via a magnetic head supporting member; means for landing the magnetic head onto the disc-like recording medium via the magnetic head supporting member; and controlling means for landing, when the disc-like recording medium is loaded, the magnetic head via the magnetic head landing means while moving the magnetic head radially of the disc-like recording medium via the magnetic head moving means.
Thus, when the disc-like recording medium is loaded, the magnetic head will not always land at the same position. Namely, each time a disc-like recording medium is loaded, the magnetic head lands at a different position. Also, the magnetic head can thereby land softly.
Furthermore, a magnetic head landing driving means included in the magnetic head landing means is controlled to vary the landing speed for the magnetic head landing means to land the magnetic head slowly onto the disc-like recording medium. Thus, the soft landing of the magnetic head can be further assisted.